Today on my Yahoo news alerts, there is an article about a Twitter debate currently going on about last night's [[July 12) Jeopardy episode. It was another one of those cases in which the top two contestants were in a position going into Final Jeopardy in which there was only one wager for each one of them that made any sense at all, yet neither one of them made the correct move. As a result the returning champion won again, although he deserved to lose.

The situation was that the champ had $20,000 and the challenger had $10,000. So the only obvious choices were for the champ to wager nothing and the challenger to wager everything. That would have opened up the possibility for a tie, which these days would be resolved by a tense, tie-breaking question to decide the match.

Well the challenger for some odd reason only wagered $3,000, but he got the question right, so he finished at $13,000. The champion then missed the question, but had bet $1.00, so he finished at $19,999. Therefore we now know that if the challenger had bet everything, as he should have, then he would have won by a $20,000 to $19,999 margin.

This kind of thing happens often enough that it makes you wonder why such brilliant people can answer so many questions but apparently cannot do simple math. The champ by the way had won his first game on Monday with an odd wager as well.